Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a system and method for selection, design, manufacture and sale customized products having indicia surfaces, including but not limited to fashion items or jewelry. More specifically, the invention relates to a computer-based method and system and interface for customer-driven design and manufacture of customized jewelry items, which combines key elements of computer aided design methodologies to allow a user to personalize or customize jewelry items with creation of direct machine an engraving of, for example, a geographical location or street map of a particular significant location to a user, and a gem stone (e.g., optional feature motif) to mark or identify the specific address or location.
Description of the Related Art
The customization of fashion items or durable goods products is a desirable characteristic that many retail markets would enjoy being able to broadly utilize and many consumers would enjoy broadening their product selection and bringing what they buy closer to what they want. Unfortunately sales, distribution and manufacturing systems designed to deliver mass-manufactured goods to consumers and/or job-shops that do custom manufacturing are not positioned to effectively deliver individualized mass-customization, placing custom-designed products out of the reach of consumers. Additionally, the machines, methods and labor are ineffective at delivering customization cost-effectively. An example is the manufacture of class rings or other jewelry. The diversity of these products is defined by the selection of a fixed number of molds and tooling used to inject wax which is used to cast the final product. A manufacturer cannot provide an infinite product selection or face the challenge of also producing and storing an infinite number of molds and tooling parts.
The customization characteristics desired by individuals are diverse and therefore, the method is applicable to a wide array of products. For example; a customer may desire a custom-designed broach or ring that contains a representation of a family crest or insignia. To obtain this custom product requires specialized training. Designing these products and having them individually manufactured is expensive and, the equipment necessary is not normally available to the general public nor is the operating procedure of the equipment. Therefore, customization options to consumers are again limited and access to customization of products is difficult. The result is that individual needs and or desires are not always met and customers therefore settle for less than what they wanted or desired.
Computer-based networks, access systems, websites, databases, process controllers, and related processing modules and processing speeds, etc. have reached a sufficient level of performance to provide consumers with the ability to drive changes to products themselves in many aspects. Consumer capabilities to understand such systems have also reached a level sufficient for consumers to realistically be involved in at least some aspects of a design process, for example those that do not cause risk to customers or liability to a manufacturers, as defined by constraints preventing a customer from violating the constraints during design for personalization or customization.
Jewelry design normally involves the creation of individualized jewelry items in fixed multiples. For example, a diamond necklace may be designed to have a wide variety of numbers of diamonds, diamond shapes, diamond quality, diamond placements or orientations, chain lengths, chain designs or color. An appropriate selection of these or other characteristics can result in a necklace which is highly attractive to certain individual customers and for which those customers may pay a premium to express themselves through the jewelry design. Generally, to create such a design, a highly skilled artisan assimilates information concerning the design, including specific information from one or more potential purchasers. The designer then creates a feature design and lays that feature design out on a neckline (or other feature path) a number of times, each time re-sizing and re-orienting the feature to reflect the feature placement on the feature path. The difficulty with this process is that re-sizing and re-orienting a single or a multiple feature item a number of times is a time consuming and inefficient process. Such a conventional process does not provide the designer with the freedom to quickly create multiple designs.
Furthermore, because the conventional design process does not enable a designer to quickly create multiple designs, design changes suggested by individual customers or other persons (e.g., sales personnel) having information to be used in the design are generally not directly incorporated into the design process. This is a problem because the more involved a customer is in the creation of the design, the more attached the customer may become to the resulting item of jewelry. Similarly, the more involved sales personnel are in creating a design, the more customer information is incorporated into the design and the more the sales person will be involved in selling that specific design.